Naming Characters

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about how I do something – I think the last one may have been writing about first kisses ages ago? – so, I shall do a new one today, about how I come up with the names for my characters.

Usually, in all the books I’ve attempted to write before, I’ve picked ones that have specific meanings, or are literary names – for example, in a previous one, the heroine was called Hero Bronte Murphy (before I developed a deep-seated hatred for whichever Bronte sister wrote Wuthering Heights [I really should figure this out before I sit the Wuthering Heights exam in June]) – Hero because of the character from “Much Ado About Nothing” (again, before we started studying it in English) and Bronte because of the literary connotations (my justification for this is because it’s set fairly far in the future and deals with humans away from Earth, the parents would want to keep the memory of classic literature alive).

Then, when it came to this one, naming characters came very naturally. There was no looking online or searching for fancy meanings – all the names just occurred to me when I was writing about the characters. The two main characters are called Lilly and Adam – Lilly because I was reading Harry Potter at the time, and Adam because it seems to sound nice with Lilly and is a fairly modern man’s name, which is what I was looking for. There is a Welsh Celtic warrior called Daeron Pentraeth – Daeron was just a celtic-sounding one, and I wanted it to begin with a D because of the person his character is very loosely based on. Pentraeth is Welsh for head of the beach, and to be honest there’s no real meaning behind it, he isn’t the head of a beach or anything, I just wanted a Welsh surname and that’s the first one that occurred to me. Another character is a young girl, Imogen Love – again, just because I like the name “Imogen”,  and Love is a cool surname which completely contrasts with her family life.

There isn’t actually anyone with an out-there name, I don’t think – my characters this time have names like Charles, Ella, David, Bryce, Aaron, Joe, Harry etc compared to when it used to be ridiculous names I couldn’t even pronounce, because I set so much store by the meaning of it. Obviously I try not to pick names with stupid meanings that make the name ridiculous, but for many of them, I haven’t actually looked at what their names mean – obviously Lilly is after a flower, and I think Adam is Biblical, but Daeron is completely made up and I haven’t the foggiest about the rest of them, and the meanings had no influence on what I chose.

I hope that’s a sign that my writing skills are improving and maturing, because I want to focus on making a more natural, believable story than one where I’ve picked names I’m really pleased with, but possibly to the detriment of the story itself!

However, if you do want to pick names with a meaning, a website I’ve found to be absolutely invaluable is behindthename – http://www.behindthename.com – because you can search for names by meaning or words in the description, and you can also search by language and origin. I don’t want it to come across that I’m saying picking names with a meaning is wrong all the time, but the way I did it was very wrong – even if the name didn’t suit the character at all, I’d pick it because I liked the meaning, which made the stories quite bad to write because I didn’t like writing about the characters.

Writing when ill…

Normally, when I’m ill, I get my best writing done. I mean, when you’re stuck in bed all day with a bad cold, or coughing your lungs up, there’s not really much more you can do than watch television, grab the old laptop and amuse yourself by writing. Today, however, I’m off college because I’m ill – but this isn’t the sort of illness where you can actually make use of the fact that you feel like crap by churning out a couple of thousand words in between eating copious amounts of chicken soup and watching Jeremy Kyle/other equally amusing-yet-horrifying “let’s deal with your relationship problems live on air” TV shows – or am I the only one who does that when I have a cold?

Nope, today I’ve encountered the horrible problem of BRAIN FOG. *horror chords*. Yep, as well as the fatigue, joint pains, muscle pains, headache and sore throat, my head feels like it’s been stuck in a blender and I could very well pass for a zombie out of Shaun Of The Dead (or one of the Romero “_____ of the Dead” movies if you’ve never seen the brilliant Simon Pegg parody) this morning, and I’m FED UP! I want to write, because I know what I want to write – but thanks to this brain fog, I don’t think the messages will actually reach my hands before my hands have gone “I can’t be bothered waiting for these words, let’s play on Bejewelled Blitz/stalk people on Facebook instead”.

I can’t even write my coursework! I’d actually like to get my coursework done and dusted, but it’s proving impossible because I’m looking at these words I’ve written down in my plan (it’s a comparison of the presentation of the theme of marriage in Much Ado About Nothing, and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof) and I don’t think I even remember writing them. Plus my teacher has made notes that are nearly impossible to decipher when my head’s like this. Even as I’m writing this, it’s going slowly and I can feel my fingers edging nearer and nearer to the mousepad to click on the tab with Facebook on it. Must – resist – must – keep – writing – curses, foiled again. Oh well. Facebook it is!